I took my turn rowing up the Avon with two of the great travellers of my generation, Jeremy Seal and Rupert Smith. This river pilgrimage out from the city of Bath was also designed to be a floating Eland think tank, with book thoughts popping out at our bankside coffee brewing stops. To celebrate what turned out to be the only fine day in May, I wisely swam in the river, where the water was made lively below a loch gate. Some friendly swans joined the aquatic fuck-wits, (as we were affectionately nicknamed by one's wife), during the picnic.
7 May
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A Moroccan Trilogy: Marrakesh, Rabat and Fez
Introduced by Barnaby Rogerson
One of the finest British travel books of the twentieth century is Gavin Maxwell’s Lords of the Atlas. It is a book that inspired me as a teenager to travel, and later on to write about North Africa. I must have now read it half a dozen times, with its magic enhanced by each reading. In other books, Gavin Maxwell writes freely about his own life, his family and experiences, but in Lords of the Atlas he hardly appears in the text, the better to focus the narrative on the experience of the Moroccans. Aside from his own researches, Gavin Maxwell was clearly inspired by two travel writers, Walter Harris (especially Morocco that Was) and the three Moroccan books written by the Tharaud brothers.
Jérôme and Jean Tharaud were faithful and truthful observers, dependent on their own experiences which they relate with empathy, but also the sharp eye of actual observation. They were also French, so could not pretend to be innocent observers of the modernization of Morocco through colonial conquest, even when camouflaged as a ‘Protectorate’. However I think you will agree that the extraordinary veracity of their eyewitness accounts, preserves for us the true history of Morocco. We are grateful to Anthony Gladstone-Thompson for making the first ever translation of these books from their original French into a fresh, clear English which Eland is proud to publish.
Dervla Murphy at 90
‘… it’s unimaginable to me how anyone could not be familiar with Ireland’s greatest travelling icon, our courageous, eloquent, world wanderer, whose seminal works of travel literature over five decades and four continents count as one of Ireland’s greatest literary achievements.’ Manchan Magan, Irish Times
Dervla Murphy in her own words, extracted from a 2016 interview
What is your earliest travelling memory?
My earliest memory should have been – the Rhineland, 1939. Hitler blocked that by sending to Belsen the friend with whom we were to have stayed. So I first left Ireland in January 1948, at the age of 16, to cheer the boys in green at Twickenham. I forget who won. I’ve never forgotten the shock of seeing with my own eyes what bombing can do to a city ... I saw more of the same a year later on my first solo cycle tour of Germany.
Barnaby Rogerson on Francis Yeats-Brown's BENGAL LANCER
Extracted from Barnaby Rogerson’s afterword to Eland’s new edition
Bengal Lancer was published in the summer of 1930 and proved a phenomenal success in both the British Isles and North America. Over 150,000 copies were sold and the London publisher, Victor Gollancz, sold foreign rights to Italy, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Rumania. The film rights were snapped up by Hollywood for fifteen thousand dollars and in January 1935 Paramount released The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, [starring Gary Cooper] which was saluted as one of the great adventure stories of cinema. Francis Yeats-Brown was able to admire the film on its own merits and was amused rather than outraged that it had so little to do with his book. But having read Bengal Lancer, you will understand how difficult it would be to create a film that would in any way be true to the text.
Dervla Murphy on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters
Extracted from Dervla Murphy’s afterword to Eland’s new edition of The Turkish Embassy Letters
The letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu have long been a favourite ‘quote-mine’ for historians, biographers, essayists and travel writers. Yet to most general readers she herself has never seemed more than an astringent commentator on the sidelines – almost a disembodied voice. In our own day, with its over-fondness for labels, she has been referred to as a ‘pioneer woman traveller and/or feminist’, though it is impossible to squeeze her into either category without distorting her personality. Any reader of her letters must think of her, primarily, as an individual: strong-willed, warm-hearted, keen-witted, high-spirited, often unpredictable, sometimes downright eccentric – a woman who rarely allowed her many disappointments and misfortunes to provoke recriminations or self-pity. She was at once stoical and imaginative, gullible and shrewd, childishly vain and touchingly humble, sincere and loyal in her affections but occasionally indiscriminate in her choice of friends. As the years taught her to value wisdom above knowledge, she became wryly self-mocking. And nowhere in her own writings – feline as she could be in her snap judgements – is there anything approaching the scurrility with which she was repeatedly tormented by Alexander Pope, Horace Walpole and their (often anonymous) hangers-on.
Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, 1880-91
‘This book about Arthur Rimbaud’s years in Africa was first published nearly a quarter of a century ago. There have been some discoveries since then - two new photographs; a few fragments of reminiscence from those who knew him; some further information about the Abyssinian woman who lived with him in Harar and Aden. I have incorporated these findings in to this new edition. We learn a little more, but the story will always remain shadowy: he has covered his tracks too well.’ Preface to the Eland edition
Read MoreA Book Full of Rogersons - Not the Eland Classic List!
Eland exists to preserve stories about the diverse societies of our world. Most of them are written by outsiders, for there is an energy and an enthusiasm about being a traveller, knowing that you have only a limited time to catch hold of what you can, to question and record before you are forced to move on. Some have been written by people who were unwittingly thrown into another culture, and then decades later distilled their powerful memories into some sort of narrative order.
Last summer, seeking distraction from a history book I was writing, I decided to scribble down some stories about my own culture, focusing on my father’s family and peeling back through fourteen generations until I reached Tudor Norfolk. Covid lockdown had provided the theatre for some very lively debates with my two woke daughters around the supper table and it amused me to write something that could not be accused of cultural appropriation or Orientalism. It was inspired by living, oral culture, collecting together the various strands of stories told to me as a young boy by my great-aunt Eve, who was born in 1897. It’s something I would encourage any young apprentice travel writer to do – start at home. I was determined to be truthful, so that I would create a real sliver of English social and economic history. I also uncovered a cast of characters that by turns reminded me of Surtees anti-hero Jorrocks, of Dickens’ Pickwick as well as scenes that could have been taken from Thomas Hardy and a surprisingly close brush with Trollope’s The Way We Live Now.
Even as I wrote it, and added two hundred black and white photographs, I was aware that I had a readership that could be measured in dozens. But once I had started, I was infected by a sense of duty. Aunt Eve may have had a fondness for racing, gin, cigarettes and improper stories, but it was also clear that despite having no children of her own, she held her family together with her laughter and her delightful, amoral zest for life. So A Book Full of Rogersons feels like a debt from my youth that has finally been paid.
Hannah Rogerson on Lucie Duff Gordon's Letters from Egypt
Taken from the biographical afterword
It is impossible to read Lucie Duff Gordon’s letters home to her family without falling a little in love with her poignant joy at life in the face of her imminent death and with her open-minded care for and curiosity about her Egyptian neighbours. It is clear that they, in their turn, both respected and admired her, taking her to themselves in the absence of her own family. What was it that bred such a natural nobility and sense of equality and service in her, when British colonial administrators of a very different stripe were already lining up to exploit the desperate poverty of the Egyptians while trumpeting their own superiority?
Read MoreSelina Hastings on Sybille Bedford
Throughout most of her long life, Sybille remained a keen traveller, almost constantly on the move, living in England, France, Italy, in her middle age writing many articles about her extensive journeys through Europe. Prone to anxiety, she never liked to travel alone, and was nearly always accompanied by one of a series of lovers with whom she lived over the years. While in New York Sybille had begun an affair with a woman almost fifteen years her senior, Esther Murphy, sister of Gerald Murphy, the close friend of Scott Fitzgerald. Tall, ungainly, very masculine in appearance, Esther was kind-hearted, clever and formidably well-read, given to talking for hours on end, drink and cigarette always to hand. With the war over, the two women spent hours poring over maps, examining the possibilities of South America, of Peru, Uruguay, Montevideo, all of which turned out to be far too expensive. So they settled on Mexico.
Read More92 Acharnon Street: A Year in Athens
AT BABI’S
It’s Friday 10 pm. Dimitri, Elias and I have just met George, who’s come bustling up Acharnon Street from his Language School, and after the obligatory handshakes and kisses we head for the taverna on Filis Street. Taverna Ta Spata is painted over its green door – green for a taverna that cooks meat, blue for fish – but everyone knows it as Babi’s. Babi comes from a village near Sparta and tonight, as every night except Monday, he is open for business. 10 o’clock being early for Friday night habitues, the taverna is only half full and we therefore have several tables to choose between. I suggest one near the back wall, Dimitri then proposes one in the middle, Elias indicates his preference for one nearer the exit, and George, after a good deal of speculative consideration, finger under chin, eyes in a fine frenzy rolling, decides that we should sit at a table close to the barrels.
Ah, the barrels. There are four of them, racked up on sturdy shelf beams that run from the far end of the inner wall to the opening beyond where, in the kitchen, Babi’s mother and (sometimes) a cousin prepare and cook food which has, nearly all of it, come from Babi’s home village, where his family has lived for generations. The barrels are enormous: wide and deep enough, I think, to drown whole armies of Clarences, and they contain the best retsina in the world. It, too, comes from Babi’s native village, and because we are trusties, as soon as we arrive one or other of us is permitted to fill a copper jug from whichever barrel Babi gestures towards and to collect glasses from the high counter separating the kitchen area from the rest of the taverna. It may take some time before Babi is free to come to our table, but we are not required to wait for drink. And so we clink our filled glasses, bang them on the table, wish ourselves and everyone else good health, and take our first sips.
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Read MoreDervla Murphy awarded the Edward Stanford Outstanding Contribution to Travel Writing Award 2021
This is the piece that Dervla Murphy wrote for OX-TRAVELS: Meetings with remarkable travel writers, published in 2011 by Profile Books, which contains three dozen stories of travel, the royalties of which were pledged to the coffers of Oxfam.
On a cold grey day at the end of March 1964, shortly after my return from India, I first met a Tibetan in Western surroundings – the foyer of a central London hotel. I had been working for some months in Dharamsala, then an overcrowded and under-funded refugee camp for Tibetan children, and that moving encounter with the Tibetan way of being made me feel slightly apprehensive about Lobsang. How would this young man, only five years out of Tibet and three months out of India, be reacting to our Western ways? But I needn’t have worried; by the time our refugee-related business had been concluded I knew that Lobsang was in no danger of being ‘tainted’ – he was simply adjusting to his new circumstances to the extent required by good manners.
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Read MoreAlberto Manguel on Ronald Wright's Peru, 'Cut Stones and Crossroads'
The great twelfth-century traveler Ibn al-Arabi defined the very origin of our human existence as movement. “Immobility can have no part in it,” wrote Ibn al-Arabi, “for if existence were immobile it would return to its source, which is the Void. That is why the voyaging never stops, in this world or in the hereafter.” With a malicious linguistic twist, Ibn al-Arabi confuses our endless movement through time, from cradle to grave, with a pragmatic movement through space. Certainly, even cloistered in one’s room for the whole of one’s life, one is condemned to travel through the years, hour after hour, each one wounding us, as a sundial motto has it, until the last one kills us. And yet, an opponent of Ibn al-Arabi might have argued movement from one point of this earth to another is merely a succession of moments of being still: our geography exists only in the instant in which we are there, standing on our own two feet.
This notion of travel as moving through space, but also being in one place at a time, is vividly exemplified in the travel books of Ronald Wright, Cut Stones and Crossroads and Time Among the Maya, and in the history told in Stolen Continents. For several decades now, he has diligently chronicled the ancient civilizations of Latin America, traveling through Peru and Mexico, and rooting himself in a succession of historical moments, visiting not only the present landscapes but also those long vanished, like the courageous Time Traveller imagined by H.G. Wells. Wright witnesses the past from the vantage point of the present and reports back to us.
Monica Connell 'Against a Peacock Sky: Two years in the life of a Nepalese Village'
But I didn’t go – because there was another side to it: I was infatuated with the village. I loved the slow simplicity of the subsistence farmer’s life: how going to work meant growing food to eat; how everything was acted out against a backdrop of the landscape, the weather and the seasons. For all its hardships, life had a basic logic that we’ve long since lost in the West. I loved the absence of shops and advertising, the purity of children who’d never watched television, the great pleasure of eating different foods as they ripened with the seasons – the first wild greens and strawberries, a rare bowl of milk in summer – as opposed to our own processed and preserved permanent supplies. But most of all I loved the occasional feeling that we belonged, like the time I became mitini (ritual friend) with Jakali; and like the time we came back from Kathmandu with fishing hooks and lines, spices and photographs as presents, and were invited to house after house for celebratory meals.
*****
In the years since we left Talphi, Peter has been back three times. He tells me that Kalchu and Chola and the children have been pleased to see him and are as warm and generous as they ever were. He also tells me the news of the village; who has been married, who has had a child, whose son now has a government job in Jumla. I haven’t been back. For the time being, the memory is as much as my senses can process.
Victoria Hislop on Dilys Powell's An Affair of the Heart
An Affair of the Heart is one of several books Dilys Powell wrote about Greece. Part memoir, part history and part travelogue, it is written with great emotion but little sentimentality.
While she was at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read modern languages, Dilys Powell met Humfry Payne, and they married in 1926, the same year that he became the Director of the British School at Athens, the archaeological organisation responsible for digs undertaken by the British in Greece. After Powell joined the literary pages of the Sunday Times in 1928, she divided her time between Greece, where she joined her husband on excavations, and London, where she pursued a journalistic career that was to last five decades. For nearly ten years she spent a good deal of time with Humfry at his site at Perachora on the Gulf of Corinth, but after his tragic death in 1936 from a staphylococcus infection
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Read MoreJan Morris remembered by Barnaby Rogerson and others
Jan Morris remembered by Barnaby Rogerson and others
Jan Morris is in the pantheon of British travel writers, even though she has repeatedly tried to escape from this restrictive label. She started out as a jobbing journalist (trained on a provincial newspaper) but through her own talents broke free of all constraints to become a travelling writer, the very role model of a free spirit, living a life of her choice. She was beholden to no editor but instead built up a devoted readership, staying true to her own distinctive literary style and remaining with one of the finest, and most enduring, of the independent publishing houses, Faber & Faber. Her range is vast, over fifty books now carry her name. Ironically for a famous stylist this literary freedom was won with a brief, coded telegram – the worldwide scoop of Hillary’s conquest of Mount Everest (the crowning glory) on the eve of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
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Read MoreNews from the Attic
We are all hoping that on the stroke of midnight, December 2nd, shopping will instantly revive, and bars, restaurants, bookshops and theatres will throw their doors open, staying open all hours, so we can catch up on metropolitan life. However just in case this does not happen, may we draw your attention to the BUY buttons on the Eland website? Most of you know exactly what you want and don’t want to read, but we thought we might point out some potential presents from the lesser-known corners of Eland’s extraordinary list for problem kith and kin.
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Read MoreDinner of Herbs: Maureen Freely's interview with Carla Grissmann
Carla Grissmann does not keep a diary. She is not one for dates. But she is fairly sure she made her first visit to Anatolia in the spring of 1968 or 1969. She would have been forty or forty-one at the time. She was based in Jerusalem, working in the proofreading department of an English-language newspaper. Someone had told her about the cave churches in Cappadocia, and she wanted to see them for herself.
During her two-month stay in Ürgüp, she made friends with a young schoolteacher named Kâmuran. In halting English, he told her about the central Anatolian hamlet where he taught. She listened carefully to his stories and tried to make a picture from his faltering words: ‘village, forty houses, 300 people in all, no electricity, no road, walking from one village to another with his hands full of stones to throw at the dogs that leapt around him’. Before moving to Jerusalem, she had worked in Morocco and Tunisia. Her brief glimpses of village life in those countries had made her hungry for more. ‘For a long time I had wanted to touch the life of a Turkish village, knowing how remote it was from the classical splendours of Istanbul or the Ionian coast, and how different it must be from a Muslim village in North Africa, but I knew I could not approach a village alone.’ So she asked Kâmuran if he could take her there. His first response was, ‘You will not like it.’
Pico Iyer on Ronald Wright's TIME AMONG THE MAYA: Travels in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize
‘Candles glow like fireflies through the smoke,’ Ronald Wright observes as he climbs up to Mass in a Catholic church that doubles as a Mayan site in Chichicastenango, Guatemala. ‘Women on the lower steps are selling arum lilies and other flowers, as bright as their striped huipiles; silent babies stare wide-eyed from brilliant carrying cloths on their mothers’ backs. Most of the Quiché men wear straw Stetsons and cheap manufactured clothes, but at the top of the platform, there are half a dozen chuchkahau dressed in the outfit we’ve seen on the hotel staff. Here the strange blend of Mesoamerica and Europe seems appropriate, adding dignity to the lined, fervent faces swinging censers, calling on ancestors, kneeling in quiet supplication, oblivious of the orderly turmoil all around them.’
It’s only one paragraph among a thousand such, at once vivid and suggestive, drawing expected exoticism together with unexpected details into a fine, complex mesh. I can see the candles like fireflies, the wide-eyed gaze of the babies amid the dazzling colours. Yet I can also see how the local indigenous population has a genius for surviving by taking in the ways of the conqueror and making them its own—the central theme of Wright’s account of travelling through Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize in 1985. I see how Stetsons and somewhat inauthentic local costumes merge, and how shades of Europe (those ‘swinging censers’) flit through the New World setting. Everything is ‘orderly turmoil.’ In the same breath, I notice how my guide to the site can recognize lilies as well as esoteric customs, can register how the scene before him is and is not something authentic and traditional. Our author is a passionate empiricist, we realize, less interested in passing judgment than in collecting observations, sensory and human and historical, so that we find ourselves constantly encircled by the world he is describing, and subliminally aware of how Mayan culture can sustain its cyclical calendar in the midst of a younger world committed to linear ‘progress.’
Bruce Wannell remembered by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
BRUCE: Back Into the Blue
Writing about Bruce is like trying to catch and pin an exceedingly rare migrant butterfly – but a butterfly with a huge brain, and an even bigger heart.
The brain revealed itself from the start. ʻShouldnʼt there be a maddah on that alif, rather than a hamzah?ʼ he said on our first meeting, in 1994, during a war in Yemen. Bruce had turned up out of the blue at my house in Sanaʼa, made for my library, and pulled a book of Arabic verse off a shelf.
ʻOh . . . I gathered your subject was Persian,ʼ I said, a little nonplussed. Bruce had explained that he was on his way from the Persian-speaking lands to England, via Arabia and East Africa. I looked at text of the poem: he was right, of course.
ʻI have a little kitchen-Arabic,ʼ he said, with a sideways smile.
Galloping Ahead in Ethiopia with Yves-Marie Stranger
When I settled in Ethiopia two decades ago, Addis Ababa was a patchwork of villages joined by green valleys and you could gallop in and out of town in a day. I had installed a horse in my home in Abo Mazoria, by converting the kitchen into a stable. It was a little eccentric on my part—but then again, not so much. For I had discovered that Ethiopia was an orthodox paradox—a country of individualist conformists. And I had, after all, only followed the lead of my friend Eskender Berhanu (a true phenomenon, with his stable of fifteen polo ponies, a stone’s throw from Arat Kilo). Leaving Abo Mazoria at dawn, you could still ride to Menagesha Mountain in a couple of hours. And, on Saturdays, the day of the Guddu market, we raced our mounts over the meadows after drinking home-brewed tela out of tin cans. How distant those boundless gallops on the high plateau now seem! Back then, in Guddu, there was no bottled beer (or Coca-Cola) and the market was solely accessible on foot or horseback. In the year 2001, there were three internet cafés in Addis Ababa, not many more Chinese people – and 68 million Ethiopians in total. You could leave Addis Ababa on horseback and drink porter for lunch, before cantering back to the capital for supper.
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